Schools linked to advanced network

Virginia Tech is interested in spreading the wealth around. The wealth in this case is access to National LambaRail (NLR), a lightning fast, high-capacity

research network that enables students and researchers to work together no matter where they’re located.
Virginia Tech IT personnel recently collaborated with Radford University and New River Community College (NRCC) to build the Multimedia Services Access

Point. This switch facility will allow Radford and the community college to tap into Virginia Tech’s pipeline to the closest NLR node (in McLean) and get

low-cost, commercial Internet service.
“You’re talking about speeds that are literally millions of times faster than the typical broadband residential connection,” says Jeff Crowder, program

director for IT at Virginia Tech. He notes LambdaRail has negotiated arrangements with popular content providers like Google, Yahoo and YouTube so that users

can go directly to those Web servers. “With our system, these schools are just one hop away from the peerage fabric that’s in McLean, which has pretty deep

implications for performance and cost reduction.”
Crowder says that the MSAP represents a new kind of model for the development of rural broadband access. “It’s pretty expensive and daunting to try to go out

and spur the creation of fiber optic networks across long distances,” he says. “What we’ve simply done is set up this beachhead, so to speak, and the other

schools just have to work with their fiber optic providers and broadband service providers to figure out how to get to the switch facility — rather than all

the way to McLean.”
The new arrangement will allow students and researchers at NRCC and Radford to take advantage of NLR’s capacity for higher-end applications and the quick